00:00:00 Speaker 1: M. Daniel Boone and his actions and his life, real or mythical, embodied what the American people wanted to see happen in the wilderness. They wanted to see man in the wilderness thriving and dominating and conquering, because that's a good story. Because that's a good story. And so whether it happened or not, we wrote it deep down because we wanted to read it. On this third and final episode of the Daniel Boone series on The Burglaries podcast, We're gonna cover Boone's life from thirty five years of age to the grave, or at least where we think it's grave is. Will explore Boone's adoption as a Shawnee, the heroic rescue of his daughter, rumors of his wife's unfaithfulness, him killing a hundred and fifty five bears in one season, his financial failures, and his character. We're in s of who Boon was, his significance in American culture, and perhaps you'll find his fingerprints on your life. Heroes are conduits of value systems, and will evaluate the one deposited by the old backwoodsman. Betrail has been steep and thick, but we're about to ascend to the hilltop and see Boone's grand vista. You're not gonna want to miss this one. So Boone's story, it's really the story of this country, good and bad. My name is Clay Nukelem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f h F gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. On Part one of our series on Daniel Boone, we highlighted the foundations of his early life from birth to when he was thirty five years old, and traversed the Cumberland Gap. We explored the cultural mechanisms in which national heroes and their identity are created through archetypes. On Part two, we camped out in the dad Gum Cumberland Gap and knuck key. The Gap must have been blushing by the time we were done. Dan's passage through it was key in his life, his legend in the Young Life of America. Part three, the final in our series, maybe my favorite of them all, We're gonna take a big swing at the rest of the Boone's life, all the way to the grave. There's no way we can do justice to all the stories, the nuance. But we're in search of understanding this woodsman's significance what it means to American identity today. On this third episode, I grow weary of telling you all the cool things about Steve Runella. He's played a very significant role in defining the modern American hunter through his books, podcast and the academic rigor he's brought into the space of the American hunter. Here's Steve, it's Dave Ranella. Talk to me about the significance of Kentucky to to Boon number one, but also to the American frontier. When we talk about going into Kentucky. When these guys would discuss it, they were more particularly talking about a region of Kentucky. If you came down through the Cumberland Gap and entered Kentucky. They were traveling quite a ways beyond that, because they were going out to the to the hills, to the grass the grasslands. Do you want to get an idea what this might look like. There are people, there are records from Boone and other frontiersman about massive herds of buffalo out on the grasslands of Kentucky. There are descriptions of it as where where there aren't trees around, herds of elk, estimations of maybe a thousand buffalo in a group deer to the point where long hunters could go there and shoot literally hundreds of deer. And it was fertile soil you could plant it, so they needed certain things that they could get off the land in order to pack up your family on pack horses or a small wagon and go way out and established like a new frontier settlement. And that had all of that game, grasslands, water, tillable soil, and just space where that every family going, every member of every family going is picturing that they're going to get all the land they need, and then their kids will have all the land they need. That's the promise that Kentucky held out to the frontiersman who are going there. It was a way to make a shift from being long hunters who lived off the spoils, the sort of immediate spoils of the field, to become landowners, to become like business people. Right, that was your place to go and get They wouldn't use this term at all, but it was your place to go get the American dream, which that was before the American dream existed. When I say that they wouldn't have used that term is at that time they wouldn't really have. They wouldn't really they thought of themselves as Americans. It's interesting that there was a confused even at the time the Revolutionary War among Boone and other long hunters and frontiers and he was with. There was a bit of confusion about what side of that you ought to fall on. Initially, they lived so far removed from like the the rule of the crown, that they weren't struggling from like that level of oppression there. They didn't immediately jump onto like this patriotic notion of being Americans. The idea that Boone was a dedicated American patriot is a myth. And we'll learn that he did fight for our country on the western front of the American Revolution. But the real Boon wasn't sporting eagles in American flag tato news. America wasn't even a country until he was in his forties, and he spent the last years of his life outside of the United States and the Missouri territory owned by the Spanish. This is the place where we'll get onto the same page about Boone's exploits in Kentucky. His first attempt to settle in Kentucky was in seventeen seventy three, two years after he returned home from his first long hunt there, but the mission was abandoned when his son James and several others were killed by Indians. Two years after that, in seventeen seventy five, Dan, along with thirty other men, cut a trail through the Cumberland Gap and trimmed out the longer wilderness road. And he brought a bunch of folks with him, including Rebecca and the kids. They make it into Kentucky and build a fort called Boonsboro. This is where we'll pick up with two very important events, the rescue of Jemima and the siege of Boonsboro by the Shawnees. We'll start with Jemima's story, but first you need to understand the controversy around her conception. Here's Steve and I talking about Boone's quote favorite daughter. To think about how significant the Cumberland Gap was to travel through it. When he goes through, he's gone two years it's not like you're bopping in and out like it's a commitment. He goes there and he's gone two years. We'll just imagine something like that from a business perspective. You just like walk away from your life for two years and come back and then later try to sort out your affairs. I mean, you just miss a lot. When historians line it all up, they can't even make sense of the birth you know, the birth dates of his children. There were somewhere they're like Holmett, but how could that be? He had been gone a year but then raise the kid as his oma. Just didn't make any sense when ye stuff that was his, like his daughter Jemima. He had been gone two years and he came back. And there's lots of versions of this story. The most decent book I read on Boone told this story as if it were true. Robert Morgan tells the story as if there's quite a bit of speculation inside of it. But Boone came back from a two year jaunt and his wife had a newborn child in her hand, and she was nursing a newborn child. He's been gone for two years to that, and it was found out that the father of the child was his brother and it was you know. And this is where Boone gets becomes even more famous because he said, well, at least we kept it in the family, and he raised the kid, and that that is for certain. I mean he raised the kid as his own. Jemoma was one of his daughters that later went to an incredible bit of heroism to savor life. Yeah, now that we know the drama around Jemoma, I couldn't tell Boone's story without including her kidnapping and Boone's rescue mission. We watch a lot of fake movies making stuff like this seemed normal, but this is real and epitomizes why we're still talking about d Boone. What a dad gum stud. This is the account as told by Nathan Boone, Boone's youngest son, who was interviewed by Lyman Draper. Draper stayed with Nathan and Olive Boone in October and November of eighteen fifty one. Draper's interview with Nathan is our best resource about Boone's life if you hadn't figured it out already. I love Lyman Draper. He's kind of the nerdy hero of our connection to Boone's life. Hashtag draper. Here's Nathan talking about his father and sister. The girls went pleasuring in a canoe on Sunday. One of the callaway girls wanted to go to a certain point to get some young kane, and my sister Jemima Boone, was steering in the canoe. As the canoe touched the shore, Indians leaped out and seized the girls, and the callaway girls fought with their battles. Jemima used to say she then had a sore foot from a cane stab and had got the other girls to go to the river with her that she might hold her foot in the water to quiet the pain. After capture, the Indians hurried the girl's away a few miles off. The Indians had left an old white horse. While the Indians hurried the girls, they delayed as much as possible. The Indians then cut off the girls dresses and petticoats to the knees to speed their progress, and gave them moccasins and leggings hanging mall. A Cherokee was of the group. Jemama Boone knew him, probably having met him when living on the Watuga. He asked if all were daughters of Daniel Boone. She said yes, feeling they would be treated more kindly. Hanging Mall then said, laughing, we have done pretty well for old Boon this time. When they reached the horse, they put Jemima on at first because of her sore foot, and occasionally put all three girls on together. The horse was crossed and would bite. The girls did everything they could to make a trail by dropping bits of cloth until the Indians put a stop to it. When first captured, their screams were heard. Father was lying down on the bed at his house and jumped up and seized his gun and started off without his moccasins. The only person I definitely recall being in the pursuing party was Flanders Callaway. Colonel Richard Callaway started with the pursuers and they soon found the Indian trail. Callaway was for following directly on the trail, but father objected. I suppose Colonel Callaway then returned to Boonsborough. The reason my father objected to following the trail was that if the Indians had a backwatch, the pursuers would be discovered. This would give the Indians time enough to tomahawk the girls. He reasoned that a better way would be to fall in ahead and strike and watch their war paths. The first night someone had returned for supplies. I think there were two or three, and very likely Colonel Callaway had returned as soon as the Indian trail was discovered in their direction. Determined Father's advice was followed, the party bore off to one side of their route, and on the day the girls were retaken, they again found the Indian trail. This they followed a short distance where they found a dead buffalo. The Indians had killed and skinned part of the hump and cut out a piece and pushed on. They only took part, as the whole hump would often weigh two hundred pounds. When Father saw that the buffalo had just been killed and the blood was yet trickling down, he was certain the Indians would stop to cook. When they reached the first water. Later, they found a small snake the Indians had killed, which was writhing in death. Then they discovered the Indian party had separated. The white men also split into two groups to search for the Indians, both up and down the stream. Father with the right hand party had gone about two or three hundred yards and when descending a hill into a glen, they saw the Indians camped in a small branch. Immediately, my father and some others shot at them and then rushed the camp. The girls were sitting in the grass on the ground in a small open glade and a few steps from the fire, and were apparently guarded by one of the Indians in a reclining posture. The fire was kindled, and three other Indians were gathering wood and preparing for cooking, while another Indian was posted some distance in the rear. This fellow, scene from the smoke that the fire was kindled, left his gun standing and ran down to light his pipe, and had reached the fire when Boone and his party fired, or so my sister always said. At the crack of the guns, the girls jumped up, Jemima shouted, that's daddy, and started towards their rescuers. Father yelled to them to throw themselves flat upon the ground in case the Indians might shoot back, or in case they might accidentally get harmed by the shots of the whites. The girls obeyed. The men did not know how many Indians were there, or if more than they saw might not be nearby. One of the Indians that the fire was shot and fell into the fire. He must have risen and run off mortally wounded, as nothing particularly was said about it. The Indian who was shot at the fire was probably the one shot by John Floyd. Father then pointed out the bush where the Indians stood that he shot, and there found the Indians rifle. The girls had been expecting to be rescued until that day, but had finally given up hope, and we're very downhearted. The Indians gave them jerked meat, but Jemima said she never felt like eating a morsel, but her foot mended doing the captivity travel. When attacked, the Indians made no attempt to injure the girls. I think Flanders Callaway was with the party to the left, and he was a little later than Boone's party and discovering the Indians camp, one of this group fired along shot. Jemama Boone was born October four, seventeen sixty two, and was in her thirteenth year when captured. It was not long after that that she married young to Flanders Callaway. I'm sure you remember Robert Morgan, the author of the great Boone biography titled Boone. This is the most complex event of his life. February of seventy eight, he was captured by the Shawnees led by a chief Blackfish Catta Wamanga, and because this large group of Indians appeared, he had to surrender his men, who were boiling salt at the Blue Legs. Here is Nathan Boone's version of the capture. It's so long, I've condensed it with my commentary splicing through the story, so stay with me. Here's Nathan Boone. I think it was Saturday when my father was taken. In Sunday when he surrendered up the others, he said he went on horseback to kill meat for the company. In any event, he had killed the buffalo and loaded his horse with meat. It started snowing quite hard before he killed the buffalo, so he started for the licks, which he had left that morning. He had proceeded some distance when he discovered a small party of India on his trail. The snow was now something like an inch or so deep, and he could easily be followed. Father at once attempted to untie and throw off the load of meat, but failed because the fresh buffalo strings were frozen. The strings had been cut from the buffalo that made up this heavy load, perhaps three or four hundred pounds, and lashed around the horses belly by the tugs. Then he attempted to draw his knife from the scabbard to cut the tugs, but he found his knife which had been thrust into the sheath when all bloody had frozen. Father's greasy hands and greasy knife handle prevented him from getting the knife out. End of quote. The Shawnees then captured Boone. Nathan went on to describe something very interesting about his father, My father, Colonel Daniel Boone used to say that in his early Indian troubles and difficulties in Kentucky, if he dreamed of his father and he was angry, it would forebode evil. But if he appeared pln't he had nothing to fear. Each time when captured, robbed, or defeated. He thus dreamed unfavorably about his father. End of quote. Now we'll hear Nathan talk about when Boone was captured and brought back to their chief, Blackfish, using Pompey as an interpreter, Blackfish asked my father about his men who were at the Pee Memo Lick. This was the general name in Shawnee for salt springs, referring to the lower blue licks. Father asked how they knew his men were there, and they said their spies had seen them. Father admitted that these men were his, and Blackfish informed him they were going to kill them. My father then proposed if they would not mistreat them nor make them run the gauntlet, he would surrender them up as prisoners of war. End of quote. Now Boone leads the Shawnees to his men that are working at a salt lick. Here's Boone. I suppose it was on the north side of the river. The salt makers were lying on their blankets, apparently stunning themselves with the snow then half a leg deep. My father called out to the men that they were surrounded by a large body of Indians. He explained that he had stipulated for their surrender and had secured the promise of good treatment for them. He said that it was impossible for them to get away, and begged them not to attempt to defend themselves, as they would all be massacred. They at once yielded to his advice, and as my father and the Indians with him began to descend the hill, the others began to come in from every direction. End of quote. Boone and his men would be captured and they would stay with the Shawnee for four months. Some of the men would escape at different times. It was at this time that Boone was adopted as the son of Blackfish and thus a Shawnee. Boone would spend the entire four months there and adapted very well to indigenous life. This would come back to haunt Boone later. This is Nathan talking about how Blackfish treated his father. Both Blackfish and his squall treated father very kindly, and he seemed to think much of them. They had two daughters, both small, named Puma PC and Pima PC. The former was four or five years old, ill tempered and hateful. The youngest was a mere child, perhaps a year old, with a kind temper, and Boone used to nurse it frequently. He used the silver trink it's his currency, and would buy maple sugar to give to the children, who would smile and call it molas. An example of blackfish his kindness and an Indian's idea of taste was that Blackfish would suck a lump of sugar while in his mouth, take it out and give it to Boone, who he always addressed as my son. Blackfish at that time was perhaps fifty years old, but perhaps not quite that old. Blackfish gave my father the name shell Tawee, which means the big turtle. End of quote. To make this story short and simple, Boon makes a daring escape from the Shawnee captors after four months of favorable captivity. While they were distracted by a flock of turkeys, Boone makes a bee line back to Boonsborough to warn the settlers and his family of the coming attack by the Shawnee. They prepare the fort and within a short time period, are attacked. After a set up peace talk from Blackfish, we can do a whole series on this one event. Spoiler alert. The Shawnees are held off and the fort is saved, but there were consequences for Boone because of Boon on those people, including women of really excellent shots. The civil women remember us with a rifle. Uh, They're able to hold them off from Kentucky was not lost, so the western side of the United States is not lost. It's very important event. If they had lost Boonsborough, all of Kentucky would have been taken there's no doubt of it. So Boon and it's always the hero of the American Revolution. That's when he's court martial that Richard Henderson and the Benjamin Lardan accused him of treason because he had surrendered the men at the Blue Licks and gone to live with the Indians. So they they give this deposition accusing him. Meanwhile, the Virginia militia has arrived with several officers, including a major, and they're the judges at this court martial. And Boone gets up and defends himself, and he was really good at this. One of the reasons the Indians admired him so much was he could talk. The big talk said he could talk like a chief. And he eloquently defends, explains this elaborate rush, and then the officers declare him innocent and promote him to major on the spot. Wow. So he wins that one, but he would never talk about it. This is a really humiliating After the Revolution is when Boone's influence and fame began to spread. I want to turn the ship and began to search for traces of Boone's influence in American literature, identity, and worldview. Kentucky became the fifteenth state in sevent Within this timeframe of like thirty years, Tucky Kentucky went from a complete wilderness to an American state. That's incredible thing about I never thought. I never thought about how compressed it was to stay. Yeah, so we see this thing in Boone's life. That part of the reason, you know, he was He was famous for a statement that he needed more elbow room. Once when someone asked, why are you moving, he said, well, I need more elbow room. So he was constantly in pursuit of this this edge of the runtier, you know, driven by commerce, potentially because he was a long hunter and he needed to harvest game to make a living. But also we've got to believe that that was also driven by this wanderlust for something new over the next edge that just is part of human nature. He was also he he did love to hunt. I mean, the guy just loved to hunt. He loved solitude. But like this idea that humans go to the wilderness to find solitude into commune with God, all kind of goes back to boot. He was the one that was made famous for contemplation. He was the one that really influenced Throw in some of the great American writers that talked about these things. In the final chapter of Mr Morgan's book, he makes a strong appeal that Boone had significant influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David throw and many others. Mr Morgan says from his book quote The Row begins his essay Walking by saying, I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with the freedom and culture merely civil. The spirit of Boone hovers over every page of the essay, published in eighteen sixty two after the Row's death, with exuberance and often tongue in cheek, The Rose essay is a celebration of freedom and adventure. Quote. I believe there is a magnetism in nature which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us a right end of quote. The Row also said, the west of which I speak is but another name for the wild, And what I have been preparing to say is that in wildness is the preservation of the world. That's the end of Mr Morgan's excerpt. If you send to the bear grease render you know who Dr Dan rupe Is. I consider him my speed dial anthropologist. I want to ask him about the peculiar way Americans view nature as compared to other parts of the world, and we think much of it came from these romantic writers. But originally Boon Dr. D Route lived abroad for twelve years and had some insight. The other country that I was in for quite some time twelve some odd years was China, and so China up until about thirty or even even in a lot of areas less than that years ago, was a grarian so people who are very closely tied to the land, and so their view of the wilderness and the woods in the wild I found in my personal experience very different from my view as an American of that. So we lived in a large city three to five hours from the Himalayas, depending on how you drove, and so regularly I would load up my kids it's to get out of town and go to the wild I found that as I did that, my Chinese friends thought about and interacted with the wilderness in a much different way. For the most part, the Himalayan Plateau is a barren wilderness. There's almost nothing of practical value there. If you're trying to eat, and so the question would regularly be why would you go there? They just didn't really make sense to them. So why did you want to go there? I wanted to go there for adventure and fun, and I wanted to get away from that. There's this kind of compelling I want to get out and be by myself or or just us as no place in their mind too, like why would you go there for fun? They really, I don't want to say, you know, all one point five billion Chinese people have no place for that, But the vast majority of of my friends and and people that I talked with that was just as odd to them as so many things about their culture was odd to me. It started to make more sense for me when there's a gentleman named Facial Tongue who wrote a book called From the Soil, and it is the seminal work on a grarian people's and so America. From its onset, we were industrial Chinese people from millennia have been tied to the land, hence the name of his book, From the Soil, and so they see themselves as connected to the soil. As part of the soil, you farm the same land that your ancestors are buried in. It's not something that's separate from them, that's far away from them, that you like go to for adventure. You go there if it can make food for you. If it can't, it has no use for you. Um nowadays, even I think I think this would be fair. You can look up and read articles on the vocation and the people group of Sherpas. Their desire and mindset and model of we're gonna climb these mountains is practically it provides them with a tremendous amount of income climbing those mountains. Before Westerners came money and the Westerners were in search of adventure and conquest. I would be shocked if the first person on the top of Mount Everest was a white western Man. But certainly the idea of we want to plant our flag at the top of a mountain that came from the West. But the way that they thought about it and the way that they approached it would have been very different. So this idea of even the phrase like a rugged individualist and you're gonna go off and quote unquote find yourself for an agrarian interdependent And when I say those two words you just described two thirds of the globe, you know. So for that kind of person, you you only find yourself connected to the ground and connected to the people around you, whereas you and I we quote unquote come alive when we go out and when disconnect and we're disconnected. So, you know, a primary difference between millennia of Chinese people in this case thinks to facial Ton's book and my own experience, and and Daniel Boone is our our friends in China are coming from millennia of farming. Daniel Boone is uh. You know, like so many people that came to America came for very different reasons, but tend to be wanting to leave behind an escape and get away from different things that are going on in Europe. And even this kind of fundamental idea of if I can just break away from the establishment, then I can start something new, and almost a necessity of doing that, and that would have been a mind frame deep inside of all these early colonialists with without a doubt. And so we as Western individualists tend to view the wilderness as a place where we can establish ourselves or conquer or have risk or adventure. These are all experiential terms that are entirely abstract. We are not going to the wilderness for tangible concrete that that idea was built and developed in the frontier stage of America. Talk to me about where they came from though, so so Daniel Boone's father and mother would have come over on that boat, but they were Quakers. Talk to me about kind of the Judeo Christian worldview, so in wilderness. So when you look at the Judeo Christian worldview, there's a big story that it's founded on. That big story starts in the Garden of Eden. And so there's this cultivated area of land. It's a it's a home, it's made, it's established. Outside of that, Adam is made and then he's placed inside of the Garden Eden. Everything else's wilderness. It's wild and then when they fall, they are banished, they're punished into the wildern. They are exiled into the wilderness. And there's a British sociologist named J. A. Walter who wrote several decades ago, and he actually the title of one of his works was A Long Way from Home, and the central premise of his work was that grace basically, the the grand story of the Judeo Christian worldview is that we've been banished to the wilderness from our home and that we are trying to find ourselves and find a home. And so that's just adds to this idea that the wilderness was not a place you wanted to go, and it's a place of punishment, definitely. And then along comes Boon and he conquers the wilderness, and in effect, we're giving Boon a ton of credit to And that's why this whole what I want to see is it does start with Boon, but it was so many other people too, of course, but it was it was here that that worldview kind of became finalized in the Staff. If anything, Daniel Boone and his actions and his life, real or mythical, embodied what the American people wanted to see happen in the wilderness. They wanted to see man in the wilderness thriving and dominating and conquering because that's a good story. Because that's a good story. And so whether it happened or not, we wrote it deep down because we wanted to read it. Boone taught America to love wilderness and cherish solitude, and that value system may seem really normal to you, especially if you have a rural or hunting background. But this is peculiar and fundamental to America. Boone's life was full of irony, and that's part of why his story reflects the American story. I asked Steve if he thought Boone had any regrets the tragic part of his life. And this is the question I want to ask you, Steve, is wherever he went, people followed. So he went to Kentucky, which was this wilderness Eden, and within thirty years it was an American state. And you know, three thousand people, you know, over the course of a longer period of time than thirty years, came through the Cumberland Gap and I mean just settled the whole place. How aware of that would he have been? How would he have dealt with that? And then the ultimate question for US hunters, and they're even an outdoor media, do you ever feel like that? Like, because the very nature of what we do demand's solitude, But we're like recruiting people. Yeah, if an interesting thing to push Boon on, if you could talk to him now, was uh, I would say to him, how conflicted were you? Let's say you now come out and find a great new hunting spot, and then over time, that great new hunting spot fills up with people, still shines for them. They love it, They think it's the greatest thing in the world. You saw it before and you lament its passing. But let's say that you didn't really do anything to usher that in, right, you just participated and stood by and watch this happen. It's reasonable for the person in that situation to feel a great sense of loss. It's not that clean. With Boone, though he was complicit, it seems as though he mourned it. He did not like to see they complained about game vanishing. But Boone was also speculating. He was in the land speculation business. He was invested in settlement. I think that he knew what he had to do was always poor, wanted money, wanted to find a way out of debt, wanted to get his family in a good position. And I think that he probably had to sit there and think, and you know what, man, not only did it never work right? I never got rich off Kentucky. Not only that, but I ruined what it was about it that I loved. If he was conflicted, meaning did he ever think I shouldn't do any of these activities that might lead to the exploitation to Kentucky. He just don't see any evidence of it, did, he lamented? Sure, man, we work really hard to raise our kids up and make them independent and eventually get him out the door so that they go on and have productive, happy lives. But what does every parent tell you when they move away? How sad it was? But would you ever go and do something to thwart their development in order to hang onto it? So there's like that, in order to hang on to and make it be that they were relying on you and had to stay home or not. You can live in two places at one time. They gotta get up and grow and get out of the house. And and my god, it's sad watching them go. You know, it's like it's like it's every part of my life. It's almost it was inevitable though, I mean, like because if Boone had just said, you know what I value solitude and wilderness, I am bringing anybody back here, I mean five years later, first of all, we'd be talking about somebody else right now. Well, he could have been extremely impactful in that because he could have if he really felt that way, he would have aligned himself with Uh, he would have moved in, and at one point he did, but he would have moved in with the indie and explained to them the risk and explained to them how to head it off, and then there would have been a pathway to that. He could have been a trader. He would have been a trader to people, but would have been very effective. They're gonna come through there, They're gonna come through that gap, right there. Boys. Well but what would that have done though? That would have delayed this thing twenty years? You know, I'm just saying. I'm just saying. What's important is he didn't do that. He didn't do that, and you can't find any real evidence that he ever pumped the brakes. Uh. Yeah, man, he had to have been conflicted. And the reason you know that he probably was conflicted is because he kept seeking out in other places what he was instrumental in trashing in the last place. He didn't like for him, what guys like him created, hunted out agricultural lands now where he wanted to stay. Always moved into be in where he wanted to be, which him the simple fact of him being there made it that he didn't want to be there, there's almost like you know, you know people like that in life. You know, I'm like that in some aspects of life, right, I see, and everybody does I see like boonish at least my understanding of uh why, Like what's the wrong with things just being more simple? Like what is it in a person that just leads you to kind of to complexify everything around you, or what prevents you from ever saying this is enough, like this right here, this right here is just perfect. Instead you'd be like, this right here is just perfect. If only we could build a workshop right over there human nature, man and one boat. Sweet, imagine if you had two boats. I'm imagine if this boat was eight ft rather than why you'll never understand it's it's funny. That's one of the things that makes Boon so valuable. Man. It might be better for us that we can't sit here and ask him all these questions, because he's there's enough there where you can really pin you can really look and feel and smell what's there, Like he's there, right, He's tangible, but there's enough mystery about what he thought about the whole thing that he is like a very handy way to contemplate yourself ourselves, you know, more than if you sat them down right now and he and he was alive, you know, whether they dug him out of Missouri or Kentucky, depending on what version you believe in where he's resting now, he might be like, man, I read all the books I read Robert Morgan. Dude, that dude missed it by a million miles, like me, like that, like are you kidding me? You know what I felt about that stuff. In effort to understand Boone's personal identity, I want to explore him using the term woodsman to describe himself and will learn an interesting fact. We've yet to discuss Boon as a politician. It's clear that Boone's personal identity of himself was as a woodsman. And there was a letter that he wrote to a governor later in his life, and part of the preface of the letter says, I am no statesman, I am a woodsman. So that it's clear that that's if there was one word that would that he would describe himself, describe himself as it he said, I am a woodsman. If if he were, if he were only here, so we could ask him exactly what he meant by that that phrase and what he embodied, and what we see is something that's very much a live today in a lot of rural American culture. It's something that we deeply value. Like in my family, Mr Morgan, my dad would have raised me up with that very phrase on his lips. You need to be a woodsman. What do you think Daniel Boone meant when he said that, Well, somebody who could live on the land in the forest and could support himself. He could, he could feel game, He knew the herbs. He had learned that from Indians. It's a major way Indians influenced American civilization was to teach them the medicinal plants. Uh. But you you really said the important word there, that he was a woodsman. He knew he wasn't somebody actually was a statements a statesman. He had done pretty well in the legislature. He served three terms in the Virginia legislature. He did and did some important things about getting ferries built on the Kentucky River and laws about the game, wanton killing of game. Really, Daniel Boone did that when he was in the Virginia. Yes, he was very much aware that you know, the game was disappearing, and there should be rules about how much she could kill and where you could kill it. But his life is full of paradoxes, and as all our lives are, really, But woodsman was the word he preferred in the first title of my biography was woodsman. Oh. I thought about this a lot. Boone was this legislator in Virginia. But I think sometimes it's in the place that we don't fit where we find our real identity, you know, where we where that identity probably of being a woodsman really became distinct to him. Tell me if you think this is right. It's almost like he he thought maybe he could fit in inside of that world and went there and and did okay, But it was like, this is not where I was us to be. Well, think of the image of Daniel Boone in the legislature. He's wearing well, he's there with Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, wearing silk and brocade and wigs. He's with one of the great philosophers of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson, and he's wearing buckskin, and legends did he wear that to the We have eyewitnesses of it. Now these legends much legends that they have this this really elaborate bead work on he'd have to have gotten them from Indians. I think he did that sort of thing out of his sense of duty. That they elected him, he was expected to do it, and he was the kind of person that took these responsibilities seriously. But I think he did what he thought he was expected to do. He wasn't ashamed of being there in Buckskin and Indian legends. Now, the interesting thing is to think of him and Thomas Jefferson for some new in and wrote to him asking to get in touch with George Rogers Clark. Clark was supposed to find mammoth bones and things like that and bring them back to Uh. To Jefferson and after Boon, Jefferson is the most responsible for opening the West Almas. Jefferson was obsessed with the wilderness to the west. He says in his in his essays on Virginia, the Ohio River is the most beautiful river in the world. He had never seen it, but he knew from the word of Boon and other people. So that's really interesting. You juxtaposed Jefferson, who was famous around the world, with this philosopher scientist statesman and Daniel Moon, and they obviously had a lot in common them that they shared this obsession with the interior and the beauties of nature, the importance of nature. I want to tell a story that stood out to me. I feel like each one of these stories give us a window into Boone's life. At age sixty five, Daniel was still going strong. I want to read an excerpt from Morgan's book about Boone's market hunting for black Bear with Rebecca in Kentucky. These are Mr Morgan's words from his book Boone. J. P. Hale said that Boone was not remembered sufficiently quote for his qualities and experience as a counselor, commander and legislator in which fields. Notwithstanding his rare modesty and lack of self asserting, he was appreciated and put forward by his contemporaries. Hall went on to write in his short biography of Boone that the old frontiersman hardly seemed aware of the heroic deeds he had done quote, but seemed to be driven on irresistibly by that deep seated instinct for adventure which nature had implanted in him, and whose only gratification could be found among the wilds of the frontier. One thing that may have brought Boone back to Kentucky was the bear hunting on the Levisa fork of the Big Sandy. Each winter, Daniel and Rebecca and one of their sons returned there to kill bears, collect bear skins, smoked bear bacon, and render bear flesh into oil. A man named William Champ later said that he encountered Boone and his wife and two daughters and their husbands on the Big Sandy, living in half faced camps, where they quote eight their meals from a common rough tray very much like the sap tray, placed on a bench instead of a table, each using as needed a butcher knife to cut meat and using forks made of cane with times or prongs, and having only bread to eat with meat. Bears were so abundant that Boone killed a hundred and fifty five in one season, and he killed one monster bear that weighed between five hundred and six hundred pounds. A bear skin was worth about two dollars, but the meat of each animal was worth more than twice that. Boone's arthritis was so bad at times that Rebecca had to carry his rifle for him, but he killed record numbers of bears all the same, and since she was known as an excellent shot, Rebecca very likely killed her share of bruins. Also, one of the creeks where they camped was named Greasy Creek because they rendered bear fat there enough to fill several barrels. Bear grease could be sold for a dollar a gallon. One bear might yield twenty gallons of oil. Boon bragg that he had once killed eleven bears before breakfast. With his commercial hunting conducted on such a scale, it's hard to imagine how Boone thought the game populations could be sustained. The last buffalo in the Bluegrass had been killed around sevent This is still one of the paradoxes of Boone's life and its character. Because he had been a professional hunter most of his life, the paradox was probably not as clear to Boon as it is to us in hindsight. End of quote. If you've read much about the Frontiersman, you've probably had questions about their physical toughness and wondered if they were superhuman. Here's what Steve thinks. The things that Boone did physically, like the physical acts of being in the frontier for two years and crossing rivers and the cold and the physical acts. You have got to believe that Boone was kind of a physical phenomen do you, dude, I I I explain that I wonder about it all the time. How tough was he? We like to now say like, oh, now we need all these advanced fabrics to keep warm, you know, and we have synthetic insulation in big Wider's Okay, like that that's what we need now. I have a feeling, though, that they were probably about as comfortable out in the boys as we are. The thresholds were different. It was like they got cold man bad. They were uncomfortable at times, They got bit up by bugs to a point where it would kind of drive you mad. They suffered, and they just didn't know any different. Like I, I don't think that they just walked around out there whistling all happy because they were just so tough that they were always comfortable. It's not fun getting bit up by bugs, it's not fun being cold. I think that they just were oftentimes, like really uncomfortable. Maybe it's so uncomfortable that if you went there now without growing up with that set of experiences, you wouldn't be able to handle it and you tap out. And there's something to be said about the threshold, a strong threshold. But they weren't magicians. I mean there's I think there's a gradient of Yeah, there are people that are super tough and people that are super weak in out of this window of human capability. I would imagine somebody like Boone would have been on the higher scale exceptionally exceptionally, but he wasn't. He wasn't superhuman. Would he run a ultra marathon? Probably not. We can't talk about Boone without touching on one of the biggest challenges in his life. The later part of his life after the golden years of the seventeen seventies, were riddled with financial issues and lawsuits, most about land. Here are Mr Morgan's thoughts on Boone's character. Mr Morgan, this is a this is a quote from your book. In almost every case, frontiersman were remembered and honored more for character and dependability than marksmanship and scouting ability. In the dangerous world of the West, integrity counted above all else. I think we we kind of have this idea that somebody like Boon was solely known for his for for the things that he did go through the Cumberland Gap in Kentucky, and his long long hunting and all these external feats, which is very true. But what what made him a legend and remembered and honored, as you said here, was character. And I think that's something that would not be intuitive, but it's true. Well, the fashion among historians and biographers is to debunk legends, to find out what the real story is. And and uh, we have an awful lot of that in our time. And it's good. I mean to try to, you know, find the weaknesses of people. But when I examined the Boon and great detail and went to all those sources I could find, I found he really lived up to the image we have of him. It's true he was in debt and he lost everything, but in every case some of his character was very consistent. And that's I think important in our time. It is certainly important in a dangerous world like Kentucky and the wilderness. You had to count on people and if they said I'm going to meet you at such a place, and they had to be there. And that's what he valued among his friends. His friend Steward, who was killed by Indians. I guess he admired him so much because he was dependable. Also two of Michael Stoner, the German who could hardly speak English, but Stoner, you know, you could absolutely depend on him. So Boone's legend grew partly because people admired him, they trusted him. And isn't that what we wanted a friend today as well? Though? Absolutely, I mean it's it's really no different. An example of this is that Boone was robbed of a lot of money and certificates for land in eastern Virginia. He had gone there to register this land for people, and they give him money and a lot of certificates, and apparently in this uh end he was drugged and during the night all the stuff was robbed. So he had to go back to Virginia and say I lost your money and lost their certificates. But the heart Brothers who knew him said, you know, they absolutely trusted him, and they had seen Boone in the worst situations and he always and I was somebody dependable, So they did not even ask for their money back, tried to force him. The people who knew him best absolutely trusted him. The people who went after him later were people who had lost land because of these surveys, so he was known among a certain number of people as untrustworthy because they had lost land, even if it surveyed by other people was associated with it. And the people who really got Boon were lawyers like Henry Clay, who was a young lawyer and made his fortune going to court and suing people, including Boone, over these land deals. And Boone was a frontiersman. He hated paperwork. He was very casual about registering things. Figured somebody else could do that. He was a man of the woods. He called himself a woodsman and he was. His reputation for being dishonest came from people who were mad because they had lost money in land deals and wanted to blame him. Uh. I think it summed up his life so well. At the at the end of his life, he he didn't owe money to anyone, is that true. He went all the way back to Kentucky to pay people who claimed he owed them money. He may not owed him anything, but they claimed it. And he didn't want to be known as somebody who died still owing money, so he he took the little money he got from selling his land he was given a piece of land in Missouri and took that money back. That's one story. His children said. He never went back to Kentucky. So did he send the money by mail or something. Yeah, we don't know. He would loan people money and give them land on a hand check. I never see them again. He would sell it to them without anything. He went down pay. He couldn't understand. You don't accumulate wealth. You share what you have. And that's one of the things that got him into so much trouble that here he would buy land and then set it to somebody else. He still had to pay for it. Yeah, and got nothing from the person. The ways of the backwoods didn't work very good in civilization. That he was out of place. He was out of place. Late in Boone's life, he lived as a common man in Missouri. Chester Harding, a young painter from Massachusetts, was the last known visitor of Boone, and he captured the only real imagery that we have of Boon just before his death, so no other images exist except for this one that Chester Harding did. Here's an excerpt from Mr. Morgan's book about the latter part of Daniel's life. Like almost all men and women who have the opportunity. Boone enjoyed his grandchildren. He could tell them stories and rhymes, wise sayings, and anecdotes from his childhood and his long adventurous life, and his curiosity never left him. He questioned visitors and family members about current events and news of the day, of the frontier advancing further west. Sometimes he took a bear skin or deer skin out under a tree, and he would lie on it, whistling or singing to himself. The Reverend James E. Welch described his person as he saw him in eighteen eighteen. He was rather low of stature, broad shoulders, high cheek bones, very mild countenance, fair complexion, Soft and quiet in his manner, but little to say unless spoken to, Amiable and kind in his feelings, very fond of quiet, retirement of cool self possession, and indomitable perseverance. Among Boone's last noted visitors was a young painter from Massachusetts named Chester Harding. Harding came to share it to paint Boone's portrait at the very end of his life, finding the old hunter roasting venison on a ramrod in a small cabin behind Jemima's house. The painter asked if he could do a portrait. Boone was hard of hearing and may not have understood the request. He had little experience with portrait painters, But Jemima understood the importance of the opportunity and persuaded her father to overcome his timidity or modesty and sit. The result was the only portrait from life that exists. Though he was old and frail in the Harding painting, the powerful presence of Boone comes through in the portrait. No longer the muscular big turtle of his prime, Boone still shows his character and will. It is the picture of a man who means to do what he sets out to do. We are all in Harding's debt for the last minute likeness of Boone. According to the family, Boone was surprised to see himself captured so convincingly on canvas. Harding's portrait was later revised by others to make Boone look younger and healthier. Harding captured the dignity and strength of the elusive Boone as he sketched. The young painter questioned Booned about his career, which now stretched into its ninth decade. Had he ever been lost in his wandering? Harding asked, no. Boone said, I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days. Today there are many versions of Boone's portrait by Harding, but originally there was only one. Here are the words of Chester Harding about his trip to meet Boone. Quote. In June of this year, I made a trip of one hundred miles for the purpose of painting the portrait of old Colonel Daniel Boone. I had much trouble in finding him. He was living some miles from the main road, in one of the cabins of an old block house, which was built for the protection of the settlers against the incursion of Indians. I found that the nearer I got to his dwelling, the less was known of him. Within two miles of his house, I asked a man where Colonel Boone lived. He said he did not know any such man. Why, yes, you do, His wife said, it's that white headed old man who lives at the bottom near the river. A good illustration of the proverb that a prophet is not without honor save his own country. End of quote. I'm absolutely amazed at that story two miles from where Boone lived. People didn't even know who he was. And what I like about Boon though, is Boone he didn't buy into the Boone. You know, somebody came in his older age. There's an account of someone reading a story to him about him, and Boone said basically said they should wait till somebody's dead to write stuff like that. Like he he he didn't buy into the hype. And and he he was. He died a common man. And it's just so bizarre that he didn't do like yeah, he didn't do like a buffalo Bill Cody wild West show thing, theatrical performance. That's what I liked about the guy. I mean, he was Crockett would get up. You know again, man, we stick him together, but Crockett would get up and play himself in front of audiences. It's interesting to hear the story of the latter years of Boone's life. He's living in Missouri after leaving Kentucky and vowing never to come back. He had a bad taste in his mouth about Kentucky. What's wild is the level of detail we know about Boone's death. It's kind of bizarre. Boone had an infatuation with his coffin. Once, while Boone was away, he became ill and they thought he was gonna die. Nathan got word of it and had a common pine coffin built for his father, Much to everyone's surprise. Boone lived and was upset when he saw the coffin that had been chosen for him. Boone proceeded to build a beautiful walnut coffin that he kept in his house for some time before he decided to upgrade coffins again. He allowed a friend to be buried in the walnut coffin, and he had a beautiful ornate cherry coffin made. He kept it under his bed, polished it, often took naps in it, and loved to show it to visitors, and he would even scare his grandchildren with him inside of it. Mr Morgan had something to say about the way death used to be handled in the nineteenth century. People talked about a beautiful death. It was the last accomplishment. It was a kind of art. It was. It was something Emily Dickinson. When somebody dies, she would always write and say, tell me about their death. What kind of death wasn't People then died at home they didn't die in a hospice or off in a hospital somewhere, and you know, they could tell they were dying. Uh, people would gather around when boone, and they wouldn't have had medicine to try to extend their life by long periods of time. Death would have been usually forecasted with some accuracy. You could see right that somebody was near death. Usually a boon refused to drugs laudanum, he refused alcohol. He wanted to be alert. His family gathered. I think his uh, his daughter in law, Ali was very good at singing. He had her sing. People would go their round, they would talk about things that had happened, Uh, forgive each other, that sort of thing. And yeah, it was it was a real kind of ceremony. I really enjoyed researching that and getting some sense of what death meant in the night. Isn't that like a really potentially important piece of the human experience that we now basically don't experience. We tried to hide it, we tried to to ignore it. Yeah, without modern medicine, you know, people sort of died in a natural way. It was it was just a fact. You know, it was a milestone that was part of life. It was It was like a like a birth and the death like they both would have been these bookends to life. It was done at home. I like to think about how the human experience in the last hundred years is so bizarre as compared to the eons that humans have been on the earth, And just in this period of time, have people died in hospitals and have people have been able to use by economic means basically farm out the the arrangements of their family member's death. Right we can prolong life when it's almost not life. Would know that that idea of dying naturally when he were still alert. Stonewall Jackson died that way. I remember he refused any laudanum or alcohol. He wanted to be aware of everything. He knew he was dying. But that was I think pretty common. But Boone's death was particularly beautiful because everybody was there. They all gathered around him, and Boone said, you know, don't worry, I've had a long life. I've had a good life. They offered him. He said he wanted a bowl of warm milk. I think that was the last thing. He had eaten. Too many sweet potatoes the night before, because and his grandchildren had applied him with cookies and candy. Um. But he certainly was a where of what was happening, and uh did not seem I wouldn't say blissful, but it doesn't seem worried. Particularly. This is Nathan Boone's account of his father's death. Finally, I took him back in a carriage, and my two little sons, Howard and John, six and four years of age, came along. We reached my house at midday, and he was cheerful and in good spirits. He told his grandchildren he thought he would soon be well enough to go with them and gather some of the hazel nuts he had seen nearby along the road. During the afternoon, he enjoyed the innocent prattle of his grandchildren, and to please them he would eat some cakes, nuts, and even drink buttermilk they affectionately presented to him. In this way, it was afterward thought he loaded his stomach with articles too rich and gross. My father rested pretty well that night. The next morning he went out upon the porch, looked around the arm and he said, if he felt as well the next day as he did, then he would ride horseback around the farm. He was brought in and laid down on the bed and slept. Before he awakened. It was discovered that a fever was coming upon him, and he began to complain of an acute, burning sensation such as he never before felt in his breast, which continually grew worse. When he was advised to take medicine, he declined, as he thought it would do no good. He said it was his last sickness, but he said calmly he was not afraid to die. He recognized all his relatives who came to see him during his last sickness, and talked until within a few minutes of his last breath. Some ten minutes before he breathed his last his daughter, miss Callaway, arrived. He recognized her and died placidly, only exhibiting a scowl with his last breath. Towards the last when asked if he suffered pain, he would say he did in his breast and between his shoulders. He died on the morning of September eighteen twenty about sunrise, the fourteenth day after his arrival here. Boone died at Nathan's home in fami O Sage Creek, Missouri, just west of St. Louis. He was buried with Rebecca, who had passed away seven years prior, near Martha'sville, Missouri. However, there is some drama. In eighteen forty five, Boone's body was exhumed and moved to Frankfort, Kentucky. However, in the nineteen eighties his grave was dug up and forensic anthropologists believed that the skull that was in the grave was that of an African American, creating lore that they dug up the wrong body. To this day, both cemeteries claim to have Daniel Boone's grave. He was certainly acclaimed as a great explorer and leader, but that was the place where you know, the boon passed in the legend of his only stories and memories after that, and the legend has continued to grow it instead of fading away. I mean, most people die, and you know, even if the people who knew them, uh forget them. Mostly the boon was necessary to American culture. Why does some people become more and more famous and most people do not. Boon gives us an image of something we would like to be. Somebody who can has no fear, who who can blend in with nature, who sees nature as good and the Indians is good, and takes the country westward. Of course, this brings up the issue which Moon himself became aware of they during his life, that he has taken people into the wilderness. He has established civilization in a way, but he's also helped destroy the indigenous culture and the game and the wilderness. What he's done. This is divided him and you can look at it in these different ways. And he realized that he said as much that he has taken help take the Indians content hunting ground. So he's very divided about his career. He doesn't see it as just a great success, but partly of failure. That the very thing he loves so much has been destroyed are partly destroyed. So we have to think about that that Daniel Boone is America, he's us, and he's done these different things. But it is not all good by any means. The westward expansion has, you know, has some real drawbacks. Nobody would want to give up California, a very few, but you know it was taken from the Spaniards and from the Indians. So Boone's story is really the story of this country good and bad. Elizabeth Corbin, a relative by marriage of Boone, wrote about the old backwoodsman, quote, he had a soft, almost effeminate voice and extremely mild and pleasant manners. In fact, most, if not all, of the old hunters who spent most of their time in the deep solitude of the unbroken woods, spoken soft, low tones. I do not, among my acquaintances, recall an exception. As we consider Boone's influence on American ideals, it reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt's famous line about speaking softly but carrying a big stick. Boon Woun undoubtedly carried a big one. In the final moments of Nathan Boone's interview with Draper, he said, quote, my father, Daniel Boone, was five ft eight inches high. He had broad shoulders in a chest that tapered down. His usual weight was around a hundred and seventy five pounds, but at one period he exceeded two hundred pounds, and in his closing years weighed only a hundred and fifty five pounds. His hair was moderately black, eyes blue, and he had fair skin. He never used tobacco in any form and was temperate in everything. As we come to a close in our Boon series. I'm thrilled for the insight we've gained and learned about American identity and ourselves, but I'm slightly grieved. I've been immersed into Boone's life in the last several months, and I don't want to leave. But maybe that's the point. The values of our heroes can stay with us. So much of what I value, particularly in nature, wildness, solitude, and hunting, can be traced back to Boone. He defined for us what a woodsman and a backwoodsman was, and I now cherished those phrases more than ever, and I want to carry them with dignity and responsibility in modern times. At a larger scale, I think Boone was defined by the quest for more. The modern American version of that is an unsatiable quest for more stuff, more cars, more money, more land, more prestige. But I think we have the right to amend this, to redeem it. Quest and pursuit are good things. I think we should all be on a quest and undeterred by obstacles and trials. But we've just got to make sure that we're questing after and pursuing the right things, things that have more valued than external wealth which will ultimately rust rot and cannot be taken with us after we leave this place. Our country is in a quandary to define a modern American identity. My only input is this, the American backwoodsman has earned the right to sit at the table and put his fingerprint on these ideals. He's earned the right to exist in modern times. Our conservation ethic has been honed by two hundred years of experience, both good and bad, and indisputably, we are leading the way and saving wildlife in the wild places that we love. This is deeply an American ideal that honors the native American land ethic and the revamped modern think of the woodsman. Let the woodsman, the hunters, and fishermen be stewards and protectors the wild that we have left, and civilization and concrete spread like wildfire across the landscape. We will protect them because we value them, and we value them because of the words and lives of our fathers, one of which was Boom tumble, little guy rumbling gat wake up some couplet guy probing, gag prople, little gat up cup Gady, My grandpa wa so little guy rumbling, wake up a little girl, I'll take conboy raised me upon. Rust in the dast as long as you roll, long as your long as wrong, rust in the dast to long you're all. That song was played by Nick Shoulders